Even marxists don’t simplify the classes as much as that diagram suggests. It’s missing peasants, artisans and the petty bourgeois. It’s also never been as simple as capitalist vs working class. Capitalists regularly fight amongst themselves as do the working class. This whole idea of class struggle being the only struggle is so oversimplified it’s kinda silly.

I don’t think it’s honest to frame it in generational language either btw. Though that is a component of it.

I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It’s not true to say we’ve “grown up interconnected”, by the 2010’s, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn’t a grand a unifying “american culture”. At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90’s could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we’ve all become atomized, there’s a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that’s not “the culture”. There is less genuine engagement with a “the culture”, and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.

You know, along those lines, there’s also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can “coordinate”, yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you’re doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would’ve thought that tech literacy would’ve gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don’t know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.

I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can’t, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we’re kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we’ve seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don’t learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won’t), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they’ve grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.

In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They’re all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I’ve seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don’t really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I’m wrong.

Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that’s maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.

It’s been that way since the 1960s at least.

Im over 35 and I know better than to trust myself!

glares at reflection in mirror

… you do realize lemmy users skew older, and it’s not just kids saying “eat the rich”, right?

I understand that quote, but these days it’s a dumb one. Gone are the days of “settling down” into a bubble once you hit 30.

I don’t think anyone think of China as a communist/socialist country for a very long time. Maybe except older generations and tankies.

Ironically, I have met more tankies in six month on lemmy than my 18 years growing up in China. It is truly a wild culture shock that I didn’t expect. LOL.

They already have two.

Yes blame the “youth” when the average age of our politicians is 65. Makes perfect sense.

China is already essentially an authoritarian dictatorship. There’s no big leap to fascism for them, they just need to fetishize the military and act more nationalistic than they already do. They’re already prejudicial, blaming minorities within for all sorts of problems, attempting to control speech and thought, etc.

deleted by creator

This is just a more recent mash up of the “China Bad” and “Nobody Wants To Work Anymore” meme

LOL, spot on.

Fuck the CCP. China is cool.

Will they be planking soon?

I’ve always thought the value of quotes (when they have any) is based entirely on their content rather than who spoke them. A smart quote from an awful person is still smart. And a dumb quote from a smart person is still dumb, like that definition of insanity one that often gets attributed to Einstein.

Well, you got me curious.

Seems like the first use was in a life magazine article by someone who didn’t want to take explicit credit, so chances are it was something thought of by his students. And then it was repeated by various comedians over the years.

For what it’s worth, my quick skim of the author, William Sloane Coffin’s wiki makes him seem like a pretty great guy.

die 👯

Propaganda. Every city has one or two neighborhoods (usually full of working class minorities) where police dump the homeless and addicts from everywhere else. Each of those areas has one or two particularly bad streets that look like shit and make for great fear mongering.

Hey I just wanted to say thank you for the breakdown. The intricacies of translation are interesting.

The article title sounded like they were letting the system rot, but if they’re laying flat then the metaphor is that the people are laying and rotting? Or did I misunderstand

Thank you for the commentary. I figured there was some cultural and lingual baggage that was the difference.

Would “just throw the whole thing away” (as in throw it into the trash) be a more fitting translation for the sentiment than “let it rot” then?

Schroedinger’s Communist:

The country is ruled by wealthy elite, but still communist. The government is incompetent, but also all powerful.

It’s a fascist dictorship, and only as powerful as it’s enforcers are loyal.

If things get bad, it can collapse overnight.

One of the things I learned reading Three Body Problem is that their police problems mirror the US a lot more than either country might realize. One of the characters is a cop who knows he’s supposed to act a certain way in investigations, but doesn’t give a shit. In other words, there’s an expectation that their police respect certain civil liberties, but they often don’t. Which is basically what happens in the US.

That book was originally published in 2008, though, and since then, Xi Jinping has been pushing things back to being more explicitly authoritarian. Oh, and the author has made some statements in support of that, so that’s great.

Love how y’all hate anti lockdown protesters in USA but cheer them on in China.